Rick Moranis biography

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Rick Moranis worked as a DJ in the early Seventies on a Toronto Top 40 radio station using Rick Allen as his on-air name. His television debut was in 1976 as a regular on the CBC-TV comedy series 90 Minutes Live, but it wasn’t until he joined the cast of the Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV in 1980 that he became a household name, not only in Canada, but in the States, where it played on the NBC network. He and fellow cast member Dave Thomas developed characters called Bob and Doug McKenzie, brothers who were meant to represent stereotypical Canadian men. Dressed in toques and lumberjack shirts, tongues firmly planted in cheeks, they swilled beer, devoured Canadian back bacon and opened each segment by singing the catch phrase “Coo-loo-coo-coo, Coo-loo-coo-coo.” Other (spoken) catch phrases included peppering their speech with “eh,” calling each other “hosers” and repeatedly saying “Take off!” They cut a record called The Great White North Album that was not only nominated for a Grammy, but included a Billboard Top 40 hit song called “Take Off!” featuring vocals by Rush lead singer Geddy Lee in duet with Bob and Doug's running commentary. The McKenzie brothers were such a hit with SCTV viewers that they even wound up starring in their own movie, Strange Brew (1983), written and directed by Moranis and Thomas.

Moranis was then asked to play a serious role in Streets of Fire (1984) with Diane Lane and Michael Paré. He didn’t enjoy the experience much, and was happy to return to comedy with Ghostbusters (1984), which turned out to be a huge box office success, earning over $200 million in the U.S alone. Over the years, Moranis has starred in a number of hit comedies, including Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Honey I Shrunk the Kids (1986) and Parenthood (1989), for which he won an American Comedy Award as “Funniest Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture.” In 1990 he was scheduled to film the feature City Slickers (1991), but pulled out of the project when his wife was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. She passed away the following year.

Since then, Moranis has appeared as Barney Rubble in the hit comedy live action film The Flintstones (1994) and more recently, he has been doing voice work for a number of projects, including Disney's feature film Brother Bear (2003), in which he and Dave Thomas play moose brothers that closely resemble their McKenzie brother characters from SCTV. They also provide the voices of Bob and Doug in the TV series The Animated Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie (2003).